Travelogue: First Days as a Tourist

My first day in Cape Town, I arrived at 10:30 in the morning, exhausted, went through security, took a shuttle to the hostel, and took a shower and a nap. A seven hour time difference following a 36 hour trip (12 of those hours, admittedly, spent in Munich) did not leave me feeling much like a tourist. By the later afternoon, however, I was feeling much better - and, more importantly, hungry. Not knowing the area, I just looked on the hostel board for what might be a good place to eat. And the first place I set my eye on was an Ethiopian restaurant (Addis in Cape). Now, I'm a HUGE fan of Ethiopian food: the Baltimore Washington area (and I'm originally from B-more) has a lot of very good Ethiopian restaurants, and New York has a good number of decent ones as well. Indeed, my go-to local takeout place is the Ethiopian restaurant not 2 blocks from me. So, when I saw the local Ethiopian restaurant in cape town, which seemed to have good reviews, I figured, 'Hey! I'm in Africa, lets give it a go!'

In retrospect, I guess going to South Africa and expecting the most amazing Ethiopian food would be like going to Germany and expecting awesome spaghetti. It was... fine. The mains were well cooked, nice and spicy. But the ijira didn't have the lovely tangy taste that one usually gets - I was informed that they used rice flour rather than the usual teff that traditional Ethiopian generally has. But I love injira, so this was rather a disappointment - like I said, the main courses were tasty, but every bite you take of Ethiopian food, you use the injira to take it to your mouth - so I couldn't avoid the teff-less bread. Ah well. It's not like I didn't enjoy the meal - even mediocre Ethiopian is usually pretty darn delicious. Not the best first meal in South Africa, however.

However, my second days lunch and breakfast more than made up for it! Every Saturday, there is an open market at the Old Biscuit mill in one of the local suburbs around Cape town - and this was the only saturday I'd have a chance to go. So i got up bright in the morning, went to the market via taxi, and was delighted by the numerous free samples, which pretty much made up my breakfast. Most notable was a local honey wine, which they were serving in tiny chocolate cups (ok, that one wasn't free, it cost 10 rand~$1.20) - you took the honey wine as a (tiny) shot, then ate the cup immediately after. Yum! Also notable was traditionally dried and spiced fish, fresh lemonade, various dried sausage, pestos and spreads galore, and I bought some of the popular local curry powder for future use (named "mother in law" - the spiciest curry they have around here!). So that, (and lots of chocolate samples during my tour of the local chocolate shop - which showed how they made the chocolate and let me taste the beans and chocolate at various stages) was breakfast, admittedly stretching into my lunch.

But oh... lunch...my mouth drools just thinking about it. As readers of this blog may have noticed, I rather enjoy food. So when I travel to a new place, I always let myself splurge on at least one really nice meal wherever I happen to be traveling. So I happened to be looking at a list of the top 100 restaurants worldwide (seen here), and noticed that one of them was in Cape Town. Now, while it's not a goal of mine to try to eat at EVERY awesome restaurant in the world, I certainly wouldn't mind increasing my count from "zero" to "one." And the lunch tasting menu looked like a pretty decent deal, giving you 5 courses - especially considering it looked pretty hard to get dinner reservations. And the restaurant was walking distance from the strongly recommended Saturday morning market. So, I thought I'd try to get a seat for lunch, and, happily, they had room at the counter for one!

A delicious salmon sashimi with three preparations of cabbage (a powder, a gel, and a crunchy salad with horseradish emulsion). Lightly seared beef with pears and walnuts, garlic and nutmeg. Garlic roasted sweet potatoes, with jellied beets, and a goat cheese mousse. Perfectly cooked fish with the most delicious saffron foam, and a tomato ragout with calamari. A dessert caprese, with tomatoes soaked an almost sweet black pepper sauce, frozen yogurt snowballs, and basil sorbet. Amazing! I was sitting at the counter, so I could watch them prep some of the food right in front of me, which was also pretty nifty.

After lunch, I went for a nice long afternoon on the beach (the days are so long here!) in which I fully submerged myself in this side of the Atlantic exactly once, just to say I did it, and hightailed it out of the water because it was freezing. The rest of the afternoon was spent lying on the sand in the sun, reading and relaxing. It got a bit windy, but was otherwise lovely. Even took a long stroll from beach to beach, so I could see several different ones!

That's all for now, I'll post about the actual conference itself at a later date - but right now, I actually have to go practice my talk a little bit, which is tomorrow (Thursday) morning!